Perhaps no other game has come so close to resembling Zynga's Cafe World as iBear Story's Chef Story, now available for free on iPhone and iPad. The game allows you to take over your own cartoon cafe, run by an inadvertently terrifying bear. There, you'll serve a wide variety of dishes in various categories: sushi, noodles, soup and the like, and can watch as costumed Lots-o-Huggin Bears (you might remember them from Toy Story 3) arrive at random to eat your dishes. I can't make this up...

To cook a dish, you'll tap on a stove and select dishes based on their price or cooking time, and will then need to tap repeatedly on the stove to prepare each ingredient. Once the dishes are ready, you'll tap on them again to serve them to individual serving counters. You're limited in the number of stoves you can own to your level in the game, with new cafe decorations (chairs, tables, wall decorations, flooring tiles, etc.) also unlocking as you earn experience points. Furthering the game's resemblance to Cafe World, you'll even earn a reputation level of sorts, based on the satisfaction of the bears visiting your cafe.

Via Facebook Connect, you can visit your real-world friends' cafes, or you can visit "community" players, leaving messages in each player's Guestbook, or in-game tips on tables that can be collected the next time your friend checks in with their cafe.

As your cafe becomes more popular, you can expand to have room for more tables, stoves and serving counters, but the rest of the game is pretty basic. Even though there are plenty of other cooking games to pass the time with, even on iOS, if you want to try one of a more... eccentric nature, then Chef Story just might be the perfect dish for you.